Yamaha birthday party reveals white Montage and OS 3.0
Yamaha is celebrating 45 years of synthesizer design, innovation and development. To show us that they still “got it” they’ve released a white version of the Montage and added a couple of features. Yamaha sure know how to party.
White Montage
It’s a Montage, the same Montage as the one released in 2016 but this time it’s in white. It looks great, very stylish and reflective. Ok, what else?
Montage OS v3.0
It’s always good to see a manufacturer continue to support and update an existing synthesizer. It’s already a great product and is selling well and so they don’t have to add new features and so this sort of thing warms my heart.
The new OS brings in several new synth engine enhancements and some new content. There’s a Wavefolder available as an insert, variation or master effect for adding harmonic content to waveforms. They’ve added a classic 4-pole 24db/Oct “Mini Filter” and a boost/EQ “Mini Booster” which use Virtual Circuitry Modeling (VCM) for authentic tone shaping and saturation. The LFO now has an Extended mode to bring audio rate modulation to the Montage.
The Pattern Sequencer is new and pretty exciting offering multitrack loop-based sequence recording. Each pattern has up to 8 sections and each section can hold up to 16 tracks. Each track can be set to a different length up to 256 measures. All of the tracks and patterns can be messed about with the Play FX section which introduces quantization tools, swing, note and clock shifts to generate new feels and push the vibe around. As a side note you can now assign the arpeggiator to the drum tracks for some instant rhythm creation.
Yamaha has also improved the keyboard recall in scenes and added some scene link functionality to the super knob. They’ve added support for direct connection to external MIDI controllers. Sequencing and layering can be setup in Hybrid mode to enjoy multi-part performances with single part sounds at the same time.
It’s a meaty update to a decent, hard-working synthesizer. I can’t help but feel disappointed that from such a large event we didn’t get a new and exciting product from Yamaha. But check out the video below and you’ll definitely feel energised and enthusiastic about the update.
These updates are available free of charge and are available now. The same functionality will be brought to the MODX OS v2.0 in October.
More information
- Yamaha Montage update page.
Video
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